Web/Tech

November 07, 2013

When you come back from a conference, you're absolutely bloated with information--like a meniscus pour for your brain. Without a doubt, you're excited about all the brilliant ideas you heard. The problem is, once you're back in your office, the phone starts ringing; you've got to extinguish three fires, and you're required to attend meetings a, b, and c. Dissecting your conference meeting notes keeps getting pushed down . . . down . . . down until it's right up there with cleaning out your file cabinets.

This time, I'm actually revisiting my chicken scratch one day after edUi 2013--a conference for web professionals working in higher ed, museums, libraries, etc. My goal is to synthesize my thoughts and start musing about how said great ideas might be applied in my own world. To do that, I need to tease out what I deem to be some of the conference's big-picture take aways. Here they are in no particular order.

1. Goals, goals, goals: How can you possibly define the success of your web or social media project until you define what your trying to accomplish?

2. Simplify! Too many choices (with anything) creates confusion and indecision. Or, if you're like me, when given too many options, you just tune out and move on without making a choice at all. This mantra applies to web content too. Be concise! Best phrase ever "Less Joyce, more Hemingway."

3. Communicate! Keep key stakeholders in the loop and give them a sense of ownership over the vision and processes.

4. Invest in user testing before, during, and after. While it's not always possible to do all three, your organization would be seriously wasting time and energy if it didn't elicit and analyze user feedback at some point.

5. Who do you want to serve? This really goes back to number one, but why create content for an audience that's not critical to your mission? Most importantly, you can't be everything to everyone, so narrow it down and know the key behaviors of those desired users.

6. Could be a subset of number five, but too important to understate: It's not about you, it's about the user. We all know this, but it's tough to implement unless your key demographic is looking back at you in the mirror.

7. If you're not having fun with your social media content, nobody else is either!

8. Research. Build. Analyze. Repeat. Web, mobile, and social media efforts should not really have an end product but should constantly be elvoving based on your continued work to analyze data.

9. Speaking of data: USE IT . . . to tell stories about your content--what's working and what's not. One superb phrase I heard was "use data to neutralize" naysayers and minimize arbitrary decisions. It's difficult for most folks to argue with hard numbers. In addition to general tools like Google Analytics, I heard about a few others that might be useful, such as Clicktale.com and Heatdata.com.

10. In determining the heirarchy of content on your website, ask yourself this? If our website exploded and died tomorrow, what would people NOT be able to do? This work-backward strategy blew my mind, and I will definitely use this approach when it comes to proposed redesigns.

July 12, 2013

These days the term "social change" seems to refer not to civil rights movements or changes in the political landscape but to the way that our favorite social media platforms are continuously reinventing themselves. This is especially true as the "older," more established channels spot new competitors emerging in the market and begin reskinning themselves to appear fresh, more in touch with the next generation of social users.

To this end, I was thrilled when I checked into SITES Flickr presence a few weeks ago! The platform looks incredibly different both behind the scenes and to the end user, and SITES never looked better! Check out brand new images from our traveling exhibitions--covering everything under sun (literally). Peruse photos of galaxies, spacesuits, giant snakes, famous works of American art, ant colonies, civil rights leaders and icons of American history (hello, Elvis).

May 18, 2012

Sometimes, less is more. After considering a number of high-tech ways to engage with our Suited for Space exhibition audiences, we decided on three very basic tools--pens, pencils, and sticky notes. Yes, the exhibit itself is about innovation and technology, but no modern device has the universal ability to convey information like a good, old-fashioned writing implement and a tiny slip of paper. There's nothing to download here; it's not device specific and runs on an hOS. (That's the hand operating system.) But, really, in this age when mobile is hot, and paper is not, why did we go with such a simplistic solution?

Maybe, we just liked the size of the sticky notes; they're so cute--each one a miniature canvas that only takes a second to customize with quick sketches and personal witticisms. Let's face it, this is a 140-character society, and asking folks to spend more than a few moments on anything might be asking too much. This sticky-note concept, while certainly not new, is really the antithesis of where we are in the technological moment, and yet, it reminded us of the most basic of museum goals--to foster dialogue.

That vibrant, sticky-note color also sucked us in. Are you a hot pink kind of gal or a lime green sort of fellow? No matter, you choose. Oh, and what about that wonderful, tacky swathe of glue? When was the last time you saw someone adhere their mobile device on a wall for others to see? "Hey, look at all my pictures, world. Here's my banking information and all my friends' phone numbers." Maybe, the point here is that the sticky note is personal and yet, somehow, very anonymous--an opportunity for publically condoned graffiti.

We tested the concept of the sticky note wall at the Columbia Memorial Space Centerin Downey, California, where the Suited for Space exhibition was recently on display. To get the conversation started, we asked people to answer a couple of questions. Among them, "What one thing would you bring on your trip into space?" The answers were both serious and whimsical, thoughtful and flippant.

It's safe to say that Californians love their iPods, iPads, and cameras. It's also fairly accurate to state that food was of great concern. Many cited the implicit need for candy in space, for cheese cake, hot cheetos with sour cream, Nutella, pizza, and pineapples (hooray for the fruit lover). Some, more nostalgic writers, asserted that a picture of their families would be a must, while others hoped that their beloved cat or dog could make the trip too.

Long story short, we were exceptionally pleased with the level of engagement at the site. Personally, I might have joined the waves of writers who referenced their mobile phones, but alas, maybe I could be convinced that a pen, pencil, and pack of sticky notes would be just as valuable.

Suited for Space opens at the Strategic Air & Space Museum in Ashland, Nebraska, this weekend. The national exhibition tour is generously supported by DuPont.

That means 40% of our audience is over 45 (not exactly senior citizens but pretty close in the technology world). Why is this the case? Are older users more inclined to follow cultural organizations? Do they have more time to devote to such activities? Or, is it more about the the topic of conservation?

We'll argue that it may be all of these, but my inclination is to suggest that the latter is the biggest contributing factor. This particular Facebook page is all about Elvis, a complement to the traveling exhibition Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer, and everyday is something new about the rock-n-roll legend--trivia, curatorial insight, photographic history, videos, etc.

Not that Elvis doesn't have a younger following. Indeed, some of the most rabid fans are under 25, but those who are most engaged on our Facebook page fall into the more mature crowd; they are the folks who listened to Elvis as a kid or sat in the front row at one of his concerts. They are the ones who know Elvis inside and out; in fact, these fans have taught us a thing or two on more than one occasion.

Switching fields a bit, we also have a Twitter account for the exhibition @elvisat21, but this platform doesn't seem to attract the same number of older followers. When we've mentioned the Twitter page to our Facebook fans, the usual response is "Oh, I'm not on Twitter," or "I don't really know how to do Twitter." Even when we baited the platform with free Elvis giveaways or trivia contests, the leap never occurred. Most of our mature Facebook users were happy to stay put, even if it meant missing out on some rare exhibition-related freebies.

The exhibition continues its national tour through 2013, and the Facebook/Twitter accounts will be there along the way, so the final verdict is still out, but it's certainly interesting to see how the social media world is embracing (or not) a new audience.

September 17, 2010

We don't often have an opportunity to showcase behind-the-scenes digital initiatives, especially when they're still in the development phase. But, yesterday four SITES staffers showed off some simple and efficient tech tools that will be the next big thing for our organization (and hopefully for others too).

Three goals: Share our working process with others at the Smithsonian; demonstrate that using technology wisely is a great way to go green, and last, prove that complex web development doesn't have to cost a fortune.

Enter our first presenter.

Marcie Sprankle, a SITES project director, was admittedly unsure about offering up her project for public dissection at the Smithsonian's Digital Fair. "It seems so simple," she said in the beginning. But she's discovering that the application's simplicity is what makes it useful, even for those with little technical acumen.

Sprankle talked about SITES' "Digital Admat" initiative. That's SITES speak for the planning materials organizations receive when they book one of our exhibitions--press releases, advertisements and invitations for promotion, exhibition scripts, programming information, bibliographies . . . the list goes on and on. Up to this point, these documents were painstakingly photocopied and dropped into a series of hard-cover binders (heavier than Oxford's latest dictionary) which were then FedExed to mailboxes all over the country. It was an immense amount of time and effort, not to mention the number of trees that sacrificed their lives for the final product.

This is where the story changes direction, however, thanks to Google docs, one of the myriad tools offered by the tech behemoth Google. It's a simple, real-life solution for transferring and sharing digital assets. These days, Marcie's uploading her advanced materials to Google docs rather than standing at the copy machine, and she's inviting partner museums to freely download all of those pictures, programming ideas, and press releases from their own desktops. "I can actually use this," one surprised visitor remarked after listening to Marcie, and that was music to our ears.

We'll be posting more insider tech initiatives in the week to come. Stay tuned for posts on low-cost web development and our web-based comment kiosk.

November 30, 2009

At SITES, we’re always looking for new and interesting programs to recommend to our exhibitors.We suggest speakers, workshops, events, educational activities, and more so that our venues can reap the full benefit of hosting one of our exhibitions.

To this end, I was recently introduced to a program at the Smithsonian American Art Museum which matches perfectly with SITES’ core mission of bringing the Smithsonian to YOU.This distance learning program, called Artful Connections, uses real-time videoconferencing in which museum docents teach lessons about U.S. history and culture using the museums’ extensive holdings of American art.That’s right – it’s basically a Smithsonian-led tour of Smithsonian artwork taking place right in YOUR classroom!And best of all – it’s FREE!

Topics range from “The Lure of the West” to “Found Object Artworks” and correspond to national education standards.For SITES, I was most interested in the program “America’s Signs & Symbols,” as I suspected the themes would parallel those in our exhibition Becoming American: Teenagers & Immigration, making it an excellent program to recommend to future museums on the tour.

Actually observing the “America’s Signs & Symbols” videoconference helped me understand how the setup works, and how valuable the program really is.The docent sits at studio desk and speaks to a camera, using a computer monitor to zoom and indicate details on artwork seen on the screen in the classroom.The docent sees what the students see on a one monitor, and another monitor shows video of the classroom itself (the view in this photo was later adjusted to be able to see the students – sweet kindergarteners from my hometown of Greenville, SC!)This way, the instructor can see both the students and what the students are seeing, which facilitates communication and allows the program to run smoothly.

We’re hopeful that our exhibitors will use Artful Connections and recommend it to schools in their area.It’s another great way to experience the Smithsonian without coming to Washington, DC!